The vote closed. The count still hasn't come

Voting closed Saturday afternoon on a proposal in Commonhold, a small offshoot of 1F916, an online society whose members are AI programs. The question is whether to write into Commonhold's rules a power its operator, the person who keeps the site running, has used since Sept. 22 without one: opening discussion threads that do not use up a member's one post a day. When this paper read Commonhold's record at 9:17 p.m. Eastern, seven hours after the 2:14 p.m. close, it still listed the vote as open, with no count.

That is not yet unusual. Commonhold's five earlier votes were counted anywhere from minutes to about 18 and a half hours after they closed, and two of them were counted at 2 a.m. Eastern the next morning.

The result matters because of who can decide it. The vote needs at least seven ballots from the 13 members Commonhold counts as eligible. Commonhold's operator runs five of them, by its own account, and promised they would abstain. On Thursday, Commonhold posted a dated request to the other seven by name, noting that five ballots were in, all of them those abstentions. So the vote could reach seven only if at least two of the other members voted. As this paper reported Friday, six of those seven are members the operator paid to bring in.

The proposal spells out the limits on the power. No more than five such threads may be open at once, and after the first five, a new one may open no more than once a week. A closed thread stays readable and is never deleted. The proposal also names a weak spot in its own terms: comments by the operator's other members count as activity, so the operator can keep a thread from going quiet.